Viral nonsense

I'm going to issue another plea to please please puhleeeezz check your sources before posting stuff.

This goes double for the viral meme type shit you see every single day on social media.  Most of that stuff -- and I'm not talking about the ones that were created purely for the humor value -- is the result of someone throwing together a few intended-to-be-pithy quotes with a photograph downloaded from the internet, so it's only as accurate as the person who made it.

In other words, not very.

Here's an example that I'm seeing all over the place lately:

Okay, let's take a look at this piece by piece.

1. Tilapia has bones.  Anyone who's ever prepared tilapia for cooking knows this.
2. It is an ordinary fish, with not only bones, but skin.  Note that the photograph of the damn fish right in the image shows that it has skin.
3. You can certainly overcook it, like you can with anything.  Leave it in the oven for three hours, and you'll have fish jerky.
4. Tilapia is found in the wild.  It's native to Africa.  Most tilapia being sold is raised on fish farms, so that part is correct, showing the truth of the old adage that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
5. I'm not even sure what "the Algae & lake plant, or replaced by gmo soy & corn" means.  Maybe they're trying to say that farmed tilapia is sometimes fed genetically-modified soy or corn-based products, which could well be, but is completely irrelevant even if it's true.
6. Eating tilapia is not worse than bacon and hamburgers.  It's low in overall calories and saturated fats, and is a good source of protein.
7. It'd be odd if tilapia were unusually high in dioxins, as dioxins are produced by such activities as burning plastic.  In fact, according to Medical News Today, due to EPA regulations, the amount of dioxins in the environment in the USA is 90% reduced from what it was thirty years ago -- and they recommend eating fish as a way of decreasing the amount of dioxin in your diet.
8. Dioxin "can take up to 11 years to clear?"  Not ten or twelve?  Okay, now you're just pulling this out of your ass.
9. You are not killing your family by serving them tilapia.  For fuck's sake.

Then, there's this nonsense that I've seen over and over:

Just out of curiosity, how desperate do you have to be to photoshop Trump into a photograph in order to make him look like a compassionate human being?  I mean, I get that there's not much else you can do.

But still.

If you're curious, the photograph doesn't even come from Hurricane Florence (as the post claims, along with a snarky "You won't see this on the news -- share with everyone!" caption).  It comes from the 2015 flooding in Texas.  Here's the unaltered photo:

I do think it's kind of inadvertently hilarious that when they photoshopped Trump into the picture, they made it look like he's handing the guy a MAGA hat.  "Hey, thanks for being here.  I was expecting more people to show up and applaud me, but I guess the killer flood swept them away.  Here, have a hat."


Then there's latest craze from Gwyneth "Snake Oil" Paltrow's company Goop, which is: "wearable stickers."  Me, I thought all stickers were wearable in the sense that you can stick them to your skin.  Thus the name.

But that's not what she's talking about.  These stickers, which are a "major obsession around Goop HQ," are supposed to "rebalance the energy frequencies in your body."

Whatever the fuck that means.

Here's a photo of a woman with three of them on her arm:

And the sales pitch:

Human bodies operate at an ideal energetic frequency, but everyday stresses and anxiety can throw off our internal balance, depleting our energy reserves and weakening our immune systems.  Body Vibes stickers come pre-programmed to an ideal frequency, allowing them to target imbalances.  While you’re wearing them—close to your heart, on your left shoulder or arm—they’ll fill in the deficiencies in your reserves, creating a calming effect, smoothing out both physical tension and anxiety.  The founders, both aestheticians, also say they help clear skin by reducing inflammation and boosting cell turnover.

Which is nearly "tilapia is killing you" levels of bullshit.  Just to point out one thing -- because even explaining this far is giving Paltrow far more credit than she deserves -- there's no such thing as an "energy frequency" because energy and frequency are two entirely different things.  Saying "energy frequency" is like asking someone what their "weight speed" is.

So I'm begging you.  Do a quick search online before reposting this stuff.  There are a ton of fact-check and skeptical analysis sites where you can at least do a first-order look at whether there's any truth to it.  The only other way to approach this is to comment "THIS IS NONSENSE" every time you see things like this, and that's beginning to feel a little like trying to patch the hole in the Titanic with duct tape.

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This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

In the blink of an eye

One of the things I love about science is how it provides answers to questions that are so ordinary that few of us appreciate how strange they are.

I remember how surprised I was when I first heard a question about our vision that had honestly never occurred to me.  You know how images jump around when you're filming with a hand-held videocamera?  Even steady-handed people make videos that are seriously nausea-inducing, and when the idea is to make it look like it's filmed by amateurs -- such as in the movie The Blair Witch Project -- the result looks like it was produced by strapping a camera to the head of a kangaroo on crack.

What's a little puzzling is why the world doesn't appear to jump around like that all the time.  I mean, think about it; if you walk down the hall holding a videocamera on your shoulder, and watch the video and compare it to the way the hall looked while you were walking, you'll see the image bouncing all over the place on the video, but won't have experienced that with your eyes.  Why is that?

The answer certainly isn't obvious.  One guess scientists have is that we stabilize the images we see, and compensate for small movements of our head, by using microsaccades -- tiny, involuntary, constant jitters of the eyes.  The thought is that those little back-and-forth movements allow your brain to smooth out the image, keeping us from seeing the world as jumping around every time we move.

Another question about visual perception that I had never thought about was the subject of some recent research out of New York University and the University Medical Center of Göttingen that was just published last week in Current Biology.  Why don't you have the perception of the world going dark for a moment when you blink?  After all, most of us blink about once every five seconds, and we don't have the sense of a strobe effect.  In fact, most of us are unaware of any change in perception whatsoever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mcorrens, Iris of the Human Eye, CC BY-SA 3.0]

By studying patients who had lesions in the cerebrum, and comparing them to patients with intact brains, the scientists were not only able to answer this question, but to pinpoint exactly where this phenomenon happens -- the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain immediately behind the forehead.  What they found was that individuals with an intact dmPFC store a perceptual memory of what they've just seen, and use that to form the perception they're currently seeing, so the time during which there's no light falling on the retina -- when you blink -- doesn't even register.  On the other hand, a patient with a lesion in the dmPFC lost that ability, and didn't store immediate perceptual memories.  The result?  Every time she blinked, it was like a shutter closed on the world.

"We were able to show that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in perception and in context-dependent behavior," said neuroscientist Caspar Schwiedrzik, who was lead author of the study.  "Our research shows that the medial prefrontal cortex calibrates current visual information with previously obtained information and thus enables us to perceive the world with more stability, even when we briefly close our eyes to blink...  This is not only true for blinking but also for higher cognitive functions.  Even when we see a facial expression, this information influences the perception of the expression on the next face that we look at."

All of which highlights that all of our perceptual and integrative processes are way more sophisticated than they seem at first.  It also indicates something that's a little scary; that what we're perceiving is partly what's really out there, and partly what our brain is telling us it thinks is out there.  Which is right more often than not, of course.  If that weren't true, natural selection would have finished us off a long time ago.  But that fraction of the times that it's wrong, it can create some seriously weird sensations -- or make us question things that we'd always taken for granted.

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This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Canine DNA analysis

When we adopted our latest rescue dog, Guinness, the people at the shelter told us that he was a Black Lab/Akita mix.  He certainly looks like it:

But I've heard from a lot of people that the assessments made at shelters are guesses at best, so a few months ago we had him DNA tested.  The results:

He is neither Black Lab nor Akita.

The test gave us the following results, most of which seem spot-on.  The largest portion of his ancestry is Staffordshire Terrier, which is one of the breeds from which Pit Bulls are bred.  He has the broad chest and blocky head of a pitty for sure.  The next three on the list were Husky, Chow, and Dalmatian.  He's got a curly tail and a thick, sleek coat, so those make some sense as well.  The only one I'm not buying is the last one on the list, which is Bichon Frisé, which (for the non-doggy people in the audience) is a small white dog that looks like a cross between a poodle and a cotton ball.

Maybe the white splotch on his chest and the tips of his toes are from his Bichon ancestry, I dunno.  Or maybe one just ran into him at some point, and that's the splat mark.

So okay, maybe the DNA tests have their issues, too.  But at least the majority of it makes sense, from his appearance and personality, the latter of which is seventy pounds of spring-loaded bounce.  He has two settings: full throttle and off.  Our mellow old coonhound, Lena, frequently looks at him with this expression that says, "Dude, you have got to switch to decaf."

This all comes up because of a study out of Arizona State University that appeared in PLoS-One a couple of weeks ago.  Titled, "More Than a Label: Shelter Dog Genotyping Reveals Inaccuracy of Breed Assignments," the researchers took DNA samples from nine hundred shelter dogs and ran a full genotypic analysis on them.  The results were startling; they found ancestry from 125 different breeds, and the accuracy of the breed assignment by the shelter was only ten percent.

It shouldn't be surprising; the handful of genes that codes for basic body shape and features like coat color, eye color, ear shape, and so on, and relatively responsive to selective breeding, and since that's what we're basing our assessment on, it stands to reason we'd get misled.  If you keep selecting the same thing over and over in two unrelated lineages, you'll eventually end up with their progeny looking like each other.  (This is called convergent evolution and is why the marsupial sugar glider and the flying squirrel are so strikingly similar; it's also why distantly-related groups of humans who live near the equator all have dark skin despite not sharing recent ancestry.)

"Breed identification has quite an outsize role in people's perceptions of dogs," said Clive Wynne, professor of psychology and head of the Canine Science Collaboratory at ASU, and co-author of the study.  "'What breed is he?' is often the first question people ask about a dog, but the answer is often terribly inaccurate."

As far as Guinness, I did ask what breed he was, but it was more out of curiosity than any kind of deciding factor regarding our potentially adopting him.  I fell for him right away, and he's turned out to be a sweetheart, despite being (and I say this with the utmost affection) a big galoot.  (Which my wife tells me in Latin translates to "galooteus maximus."  We are all about multilingual wordplay in this family.)

But it's still interesting how far wrong they were.  I get why they thought "Black Lab," with his shiny, thick, jet-black coat; it never really occurred to me to question it.  When I got the test results back, I was pretty stunned.

I guess it's no wonder, though, with a 90% fail rate.

So anyhow, keep adopting rescue animals -- it's the best way to go.  We've always gotten rescues and never gone wrong.  But don't necessarily believe what they tell you about the breed.

Now, I gotta go, because Guinness is ready to play his sixth round of "fetch the rubber ball over and over."  Simple pleasures, y'know.  And maybe I can get him to run off some of his ya-yas.  As the trainer told us, "A tired dog is a good dog."

*****************************

This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

A whole lot of nothing

Anybody have any ideas about what this is?

I've shown a bunch of people, and I've gotten answers from an electron micrograph of a sponge to the electric circuit diagram of the Borg Cube.  But the truth is almost as astonishing:

It's a map of the fine structure of the entire known universe.

Most everyone knows that the stars are clustered into galaxies, and that there are huge spaces in between one star and the next, but far bigger ones between one galaxy and the next.  Even the original Star Trek got that right, despite their playing fast and loose with physics every episode.  (Notwithstanding Scotty's continual insistence that you canna change the laws thereof.)  There was an episode called "By Any Other Name" in which some evil aliens hijack the Enterprise so it will bring them back to their home in the Andromeda Galaxy, a trip that will take three hundred years at Warp Factor 10.  (And it's mentioned that even that is way faster than a Federation starship could ordinarily go.)

So the intergalactic spaces are so huge that they're a bit beyond our imagining.  But if you really want to have your mind blown, consider that the filaments of the above diagram are not streamers of stars but streamers of galaxies.  Billions of them.  On the scale shown above, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy are so close as to be right on top of each other.

What is kind of fascinating about this diagram -- which, by the way, is courtesy of NASA/JPL -- is not the filaments, but the spaces in between them.  These "voids" are ridiculously huge.  The best-studied is the Boötes Void, which is centered 700 million light years away from us.  It is so big that if the Earth were at the center of it, we wouldn't have had telescopes powerful enough to see the next nearest stars until the 1960s.

That, my friends, is a whole lot of nothing.

What I find most mind-bending about the whole thing, and in fact what sent me down this particular rabbit hole this morning, is that the location of the filaments is thought to reflect quantum fluctuations in the matter immediately after the Big Bang, when the whole universe was only a fraction of a centimeter across.  As inflation took over and the universe expanded, those tiny "anisotropies" -- unevenness in the composition of space -- were magnified until you have filaments which are densely filled and gaps where there is almost nothing at all, and the universe resembles a Swiss cheese made of stars.

Of course, I'm using "densely filled" in a comparative sense.  The cold vacuum of space between the Sun and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, really doesn't have much in it.  Dust, comets, possibly a rogue planet or two.  But even this is jam-packed by comparison to the Boötes Void and the others like it, wherein it is thought there are light-years of space without so much as a single hydrogen atom.

All of which makes me feel awfully small.  Our determination to act as if what happens down here is of cosmic import is shaken substantially by looking up into the night sky.  It's smashed to smithereens by considering the scale of the largest structures in the universe, which are threads of billions of stars making up a latticework -- and between which there is nothing but eternal silence and such profound darkness that it contains not even a single star close enough to see.

I don't know about you, but that makes me want to climb back under the covers and hug my teddy bear for a while.

*****************************

This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The truth is out there. Probably.

I've always been dubious about reports of UFOs.

To me, they always seem to come back to anecdotal evidence, which is lousy support for what is essentially a scientific conjecture.  As eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you're ever abducted, steal something from the spaceship, and bring it back with you... because then you'll have something of alien manufacture.  And anything that's crossed interstellar space is gonna be interesting.  But until then, we can't have the conversation... 'I saw it' just isn't enough."

The problem is, UFO sightings are incredibly common.  MUFON -- the Mutual UFO Network -- is devoted to keeping track of all the UFO sightings reported worldwide, and it's a full-time occupation.  (In the first half of 2018, there were 3,627 UFO sightings reported to MUFON, of which 647 were labeled "unknown" -- in other words, not accounted for by conventional explanations, at least in their opinion.)

Michio Kaku, the Japanese-born astronomer who has become a familiar face on documentaries about alien life, has weighed in on this, and has an interesting take on things.  "Ninety-five percent of all UFO sightings can be immediately identified as the planet Venus, weather balloons, weather phenomena, swamp gas.  You name it, we've got it nailed.  It's the other five percent that give you the willies.  Five percent remain totally unexplained...  We're talking about generals, we're talking about airline pilots, we're talking about governors of states, who claim that this is beyond our understanding of the laws of physics...  We've got multiple sightings from multiple sources.  Pilots, other eyewitnesses, radar.  These are very hard to dismiss...  And those are worth investigating with an open mind."

Which, I have to admit, is a good point.  However, it bears mention that Kaku himself has come under fire for his unorthodoxy, and in fact many of his colleagues think he's seriously gone off the rails, either because he's honestly crazy or because he knows that sensationalist pseudoscience sells.  (An especially scathing critique is the seriously unflattering RationalWiki page on Kaku and his claims.)

But this hasn't discouraged both the true believers and the skeptics who agree with Kaku that despite the complete lack of hard evidence, there's still something here worth investigating.  And they've found a couple of unlikely allies recently -- a retired intelligence officer named Luis Elizondo, and (of all people) Tom DeLonge, former front man for the rock band Blink-182.

Elizondo and DeLonge are unequivocal that we need to look into this further.  "Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels," Elizondo wrote, "certain individuals in the Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors, and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security."

It bears mention that Michio Kaku (in the interview I linked above) also emphasized the potential threat.  Any civilization that had mastered interstellar travel would likely be ahead of us, technologically, by thousands or even millions of years, and would view us much like we view an anthill -- as being not only not that interesting, but essentially expendable.  "There's no reason an advanced alien civilization would come bearing gifts and ask to be taken to our leader, any more than we bring crickets to ants and ask to speak with the queen."

DeLonge's involvement is curious, not because he's a true believer -- heaven knows, a lot of celebrities have odd ideas -- but because Elizondo and the others trying to convince the government to look into UFOs more seriously are mostly ex-government staffers and scientists, such as Jim Semivan (formerly of the CIA's National Clandestine Service), Robert Bigelow (a Nevada-based defense contractor), Chris Mellon (Deputy ­Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations), and Hal Puthoff (formerly employed by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency).  Including a musician makes for a little bit of an odd partnership.

And honestly, DeLonge seems to be involved mostly to get the message out, especially to younger people.  Elizondo is very cognizant of his sales pitch, and his quest is to reach as many influential people as possible.  Having a rocker on your side never hurts, publicity-wise.

As for me, I don't think there's anything wrong with further investigations.  After all, there could be something to some of those sightings.  Even though I tend to be in Tyson's camp, and believe that most UFO sightings are explainable from purely terrestrial causes (including the propensity of people to make shit up), I also agree with Kaku that if there's five percent -- hell, if there's one percent -- of the UFO sightings that are legitimate and have defied conventional explanation, they're worth looking into.

Plus, there's just the fact that I would really love it if intelligent aliens existed.  There's a reason I have this poster on my classroom wall:

I would rather it if the aliens turned out to be friendly, of course.  I could do without having Earth invaded by Vogons, the Borg, the Draconians, the Cardassians, Shoggoths, the Slitheen, Xenomorphs, or the Tcho-Tcho People.  Vulcans would be more what I'm hoping for.

But I guess in these circumstances, you shouldn't be picky.

So I'll keep hoping, however the skeptical side of me keeps telling me not to hold my breath.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

A bolt from the blue

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a surprising fossil find in China showing that insects had rebounded after the horrific Permian-Triassic Extinction, 252 million years ago, with amazing speed considering the scale of the extinction and how slowly evolution generally goes.  An extinction opens up hundreds or thousands of ecological niches, which increases the selective pressure on the survivors to occupy them and avoid competition with the others -- which insects did, par excellence, and have been doing ever since.

The cause of the "Great Dying" has been a subject of conjecture for as long as we've known about it.  Candidates include:

• The formation of the Siberian Traps, an unimaginably huge lava flow covering most of eastern Siberia.  (Its volume is estimated at four hundred million cubic kilometers.)  The eruption would have burned everything in its wake, pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and it would have released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide -- not only a poison, but one of the most powerful greenhouse gases.  The result; massive global warming and a catastrophic change in ecosystems worldwide.
• The lockup of Pangaea.  The collision of smaller continents to form a supercontinent has a number of effects -- the eradication of coastline along the colliding margin, ecological changes from shifting ocean currents, and collapse of mid-ocean ridges (resulting in a huge drop in sea level) among them.
• A "methane burp."  This sounds innocuous, but really, really isn't.  There's a tremendous amount of methane locked up in the form of clathrates -- a network of water ice with methane trapped inside.  These "frozen methane hydrates" coat the entire deep ocean floor.  The stuff is stable under cold temperatures and high pressures, but if something disturbs them, they begin to come apart, releasing bubbles of methane gas.  The bubbles expand as they rise, displacing more and more water, and when they hit the surface it causes a tsunami, not to mention releasing tons of methane into the atmosphere, which is not only toxic, it's also a greenhouse gas.
• Bombardment by swarms of comets and/or meteorites.  The problem with confirming this hypothesis is that any geological evidence of meteorite collisions would be long since eroded away.  If the object(s) that impacted the Earth were metallic meteorites, it's possible that you could use the same technique Luis Alvarez pioneered to explain the Cretaceous Extinction, which wiped out most of the dinosaurs -- enrichment of a layer of sediment by dust that's high in metallic elements not found in large quantities elsewhere.  But if it was a comet (mostly ice) or a rocky meteorite, we might not see much in the way of evidence of the event.

We just got a new piece of the puzzle last week, from research that also took place in China at a rock outcropping called the Penglaitan Section.  This formation dates from just before and just after the Permian-Triassic Extinction, and has the advantage of being 27 meters thick -- the sediment was being deposited rapidly when it formed, which means that you can see fine gradations in composition and narrow down the time range for when things happened.  (By comparison, the previous formation used is only 30 centimeters thick.)

Part of the Penglaitan Section [Image by Shuzhong Shen]

And what Penglaitan tells us is rather alarming.  The Permian-Triassic Extinction, which wiped out 95% of life on Earth and dwarfed the more familiar Cretaceous Extinction, happened in a relative flash.  And it wasn't (or wasn't solely) caused by temperature rise; the main pulse of extinctions happened suddenly, without any warning, and occurred when the temperature had only started its upward trajectory.  There was a five-degree temperature increase that occurred at the same time as the extinctions, but a much larger increase followed that, after the vast majority of the extinctions had already taken place.

Right now, the leading hypothesis is that the eruption of the Siberian Traps is the most likely cause.  But that in itself is horrific; it means that this colossal outpouring of lava not only happened suddenly, it happened with no warning.  Immediately prior to the extinction event, life was doing just fine -- the biodiversity was high, and there were no minor die-offs to presage the big one that was coming.

"We thought we would see a gradual decline in the diversity of life forms or, for example, certain species that are known to be less resilient than others, we would expect them to die out early on, but we don’t see that, said Jahandar Ramezani, of MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.  "We can say there was extensive volcanic activity before and after the extinction, which could have caused some environmental stress and ecologic instability.  But the global ecologic collapse came with a sudden blow, and we cannot see its smoking gun in the sediments that record extinction...  The key in this paper is the abruptness of the extinction.  Any hypothesis that says the extinction was caused by gradual environmental change during the late Permian — all those slow processes, we can rule out.  It looks like a sudden punch comes in, and we’re still trying to figure out what it meant and what exactly caused it."

So that's pretty scary.  The idea that something on this scale could strike with essentially no warning whatsoever makes me realize how precarious life is, and how easily the interconnections between ecosystems that keep everything going could be disrupted -- not to mention the scale of the destruction if that happens.

Anyone out there still wondering why I'm so alarmed at the rate at which we're pouring fossil-fuel-derived carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

Anyhow, that's our cheery message for today.  Monkey around with the ecosystem, and you could kill 95% of life on Earth.  I mean, I don't think it's likely to happen day after tomorrow, or anything, but the fragility of it all should give you pause.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The king of the hoaxers

In general, I really dislike hoaxers.

They make a skeptic's job so much harder.  It's bad enough dealing with the implicit biases in human perception, our occasional failures in logic, and the sheer contrariness of nature.  When people deliberately set out to mislead, confuse, or lie outright, it adds a whole new level of difficulty and frustration to the enterprise.

Still, there are times that there are hoaxers whose ingenuity I can't help but admire.  Such a man was Alan Abel, who died last week at the age of 94.

Well, at least I think he did.  Abel faked his own death in 1980, using over a dozen accomplices -- one acting as his grieving widow, another as the undertaker, others as family friends -- and the hoax was good enough that the New York Times ran his obituary, and had to publish a retraction when Abel rose from the grave and gave a news conference.

This time, his death was confirmed by the Regional Hospice and Palliative Care facility in Abel's home town of Southbury, Connecticut.  Which, I have to admit, would be an unlikely group of people to participate in a hoax about someone dying.

Abel's successful hoaxes make a long, hilarious, and amazingly creative list.  Here are a few:

• The creation of the Society for Indecency of Naked Animals, which proposed clothing all domestic animals to hide their naughty bits.  Supposedly Abel got the idea when he was driving somewhere and had to stop his car to wait for a cow and a bull in the middle of the road to finish having sex, and he thought he could convince people that this kind of behavior would be less likely to happen if the animals weren't running around naked all the time.  Apparently, there were a number of people who thought it was serious, and joined the society -- a group of them even picketed the White House in 1963 to try to get Jackie Kennedy to put pants on her horses.  (The slogan was "A nude horse is a rude horse.")
• He created a fake presidential candidate in 1964, a retired Jewish grandma from the Bronx named Yetta Bronstein.  Her platform included such points as fluoridation, having national bingo tournaments, and dispensing truth serum into congressional drinking fountains.  Her motto was "Vote for Yetta and things will get betta," which when added to the Nude Horse slogan from SINA, leads me to believe that Abel may have been good at hoaxes, but he was freakin' brilliant at coming up with mottos.
• The creation of Omar's School for Beggars, which was supposed to educate people in techniques of better panhandling.  In the publicity photographs, Abel himself (wearing a hoodie) posed as Omar, and his friends posed as the students.  As wacky as this one is, it took in not only New York magazine, but the Miami Herald.
• A coed musical quartet that always performed wearing only pants.  Apparently Frank Sinatra thought this was a cool idea, and tried to book a recording session with them, only to find out the Topless String Quartet didn't exist.
• The Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which -- no lie -- David Duke accepted an invitation to conduct.
• Females for Felons, a group of selfless women who devoted themselves to having sex with the incarcerated.
• Euthanasia Cruises, which catered to people who "want to expire in luxury."
• Posing as a former White House staffer, Abel had a lot of people convinced that he had located the lost/erased eighteen minutes of the Watergate tapes.  
• A 1971 documentary -- completely made up, using actors as "scientists" -- called, "Is There Sex After Death?"

And that's just scratching the surface.  What's amazing is that he never got publicized as a hoaxer.  You'd think, after one or two, people wouldn't believe anything the guy was involved in, but he bamboozled everyone time after time.  Part of it was sheer craftiness; he was always careful to keep his name and face out of the spotlight.  But part of it was that he was really good at playing into tendencies that are strong motivators -- outrage, prurient interest, curiosity (morbid or not), and a simple desire to see the powers-that-be getting a good shaking-up.

An illustration from one of Abel's fliers for the Society for Indecency of Naked Animals

The fact is, he more or less got away with it his whole life.  (He did, however, one time quip that Walter Cronkite hated him more than he did Fidel Castro.)

The world has lost a funny guy who, even if he was engaged in an activity I generally find obnoxious, I have to give some credit.  He certainly was good at what he did.  So let's raise our glasses to Alan Abel, who went on to the Great Beyond last week, where -- one can only hope -- there will be Topless String Quartets and heaven-wide bingo tournaments, not to mention sex after death.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]